New year, time for a long overdue design refresh on my blog! The new WordPress theme that I’ve been slowly working on is now live. Here are some quick notes about the making of it.

Design

The main goal of the new design is to bring focus to the content, nothing else. My main source of inspiration was definitely Opoloo’s Squirel Park blog. You’ll notice quite a few similarities in terms of content structure. Other relevant sources: Signal vs. Noise, Simon Foster, and Ian Storm Taylor.

Typography

The new theme uses FF Tisa Web Pro, FF Tisa Sans Web Pro, and Futura PT. Tisa has a subtle modern character without getting on the way. I love it. The fonts are served by Typekit. Their Personal plan is not that expensive and I got to choose the fonts from a fairly large library.

Implementation

My previous WordPress theme had some serious issues: it was full of weird hacks, looked broken on certain browsers, and wasn’t responsive at all. The new theme is based on Bootstrap and adapts the content for different screen sizes nicely. Responsive images are implemented using picturefill. Some DB caching is done on the front page using WordPress’ Transient API. I’m using the Hypercache plugin for an extra performance boost.

Comments

I decided to disable comments as part of the switch to the new theme. I usually don’t get a lot of value from them anyway. Also, I don’t feel like spending any time moderating comments anymore. You can always find me on Twitter and Google+ if you got something to add or discuss.